12. i offer you my ancestors, my dead men

ー

are you a monster
underneath your skin

&

It wasn’t always like this.

Ah, but maybe it was easy to imagine it like that, Kurapika thinks. So frightfully easy to just believe that he woke up one day and there was already rage burning beneath him like a second skin. It’s a lot less complicated, much better for the mind to digest—something that’s just as it is—and nothing else. The present without a past. A fundamental truth, if you will. The sky is blue. The sun is a star. Fire is hot. Simple. You take it in your hands without an explanation and swallow it and believe it.

Kurapika’s truth, however, wasn’t as easy.

It’s more… bitter. A taste that corrodes your tongue. Rusting liquid gold running down your throat, a poison willingly taken. The truth to his rage, after all, was built with a kingdom of corpses. This bitter truth of his, after all, long crawled into the hollow eye sockets of this kingdom’s dead bodies—the kind of truth that waits, bitter as it were, asleep until someone like Kurapika comes along to revive it—alive to tell the world that they once lived. (And that they still do.)

Does it matter what he does, so long as he fights for this truth? Does it matter what he becomes, along the way? This is life, now, digging an old wound a grave that’ll never sit still—because if the bruise never fades, the rage will not stop burning—and it does not matter if after this he’s reborn as someone sculpted by fire and the ashes of his remains.

Kurapika calls this a plea, sitting in this church, a prayer on his lips. That if he comes out of this as something other than the Kurapika his friends once saw, it does not matter. Wouldn’t. Shouldn’t. Can’t.

It’s not an option, Kurapika knows. Turning back from this, from what he’s already done, wasn’t an option.

The longer he stares at the eyes of his clansmen he’s recovered in the wake of deplorable, repugnant means, sitting on the altar—a sacrifice to the rage he offered the gods—the longer he sees his reflection displayed on the glass.

(It mocks him, this reflection of his. Speaks to him, maybe. Follows him like a demented whisper. “This is you, Kurapika, do you see yourself?” it says, low and a string of wild echoes. “This is what you’ve become.”)

And what he’s become was quite a picture: there’s blood swimming in his hands. Ruined lives find their home in his guilty fingertips. Lines are blurred and morality is a fragile, fragile thing.

Yes. Kurapika sees himself. He’s turned into something else—for now he wears this human skin like a foreign cloth. Yes, that is what he is, now. Broken apart by rage and led by a heart chained in the past he could no longer change but only glorify with another kingdom of corpses built by his hands.

It wasn’t always like this.

(His reflection looks down at him in pity, as if he needs it, and it cuts deep to Kurapika like an insult. It murmurs, again, as if it haunts him.

“You’re a Kurta,” then it laughs. “You’ve always been monsters.”)

ー

[s.] if you’re still who you were after the dust settles (alt.)